Mauritania plans to hold parliamentary elections March 31 after they were postponed indefinitely last year when the opposition Mauritanian Coordination of Democratic Opposition (COD) — an umbrella of 12 political parties — joined reconciliation talks. The former French colony has been in political crisis since President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz deposed the democratically elected President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi in a 2008 coup. He subsequently retired from the military and won a July 2009 election described as “fraudulent” by the opposition. COD’s incumbent chairman, Mamadou Alassane Ba, recently called for an end to the military’s effective rule of the country. A four-day visit by a delegation from the European Parliament last week urged the government to make good on pledges to create an independent electoral commission and to “hold the next parliamentary and municipal elections on the basis of political consensus.”